When cartoonist Berkeley Breathed wrote Mars Needs Moms! back in 2007, he might have imagined that Hollywood would eventually come calling, seeking to turn his popular children’s book into a big-screen movie.

And not just any major motion picture but, because this is 2011, an expensive 3D, computer-animated, motion-capture movie, utilizing a still relatively untested-on-audiences technology that you’ll recall from the 2004 Tom Hanks movie, The Polar Express.

Breathed, famous for his Pulitzer Prizing-winning political cartoon strip Bloom County, which featured Bill the Cat and an indomitable penguin named Opus, has written five children’s books since giving his comic strip the heave-ho a few years back.

Mars Needs Moms! is arguably the best of his kid-lit, and its family-first message has charmed both kids and parents – the book is a big Mother’s Day seller – with its story about a nine-year-old boy whose mom is kidnapped by Martians after he complains that moms aren’t good for anything, especially when they make you eat broccoli.

But in the $150-million Disney movie version released March 11, Mars Needs Moms is scripted, not surprisingly, with a few not-so-warm-and-fuzzy embellishments, as if Breathed’s subtle attempts at familial tension and child-friendly scare tactics were neither tense nor scary enough.

Mom is voiced and “motioned” by Joan Cusack and her son Milo is “motioned” by Seth Green and voiced by Seth Dusky, and they are supported by a fun cast of characters – notably Wingnut, Ki and Gribble – that add welcome layers to a plot that focuses on marauding loveless Martians trying to kill Milo’s mom as he desperately tries to save her and come to the realization that, yes, moms are pretty important.

The Martians, who live in a colourless machined world, are ruled by a nasty female “supervisor” who exiles boy babies (she says they are useless) to an underground garbage dump while entrusting girl babies (she says they aren’t) to nanny-bots. When a new crop of baby Martians is hatched every 25 years, the Martians kidnap an earth mom who is raising really good kids and extract all her motherly traits so they can be transplanted, software-style, into the nanny-bots who, in turn, raise obedient little girls to do the supervisors’ bidding. Oh, and they kill off the earth mom in the process, with a deadly sacrificial-style dawning-of-the-daylight laser beam to the head.

So, here’s your fair warning. Actually, your two fair warnings, because if you’re a parent or a grandparent, you’re probably expecting a nice little Disney movie with a homespun morale.

The movie isn’t the book, and the former’s graphic, tension-filled dispatching of earth moms is dark and will scare your youngster, especially if they’re under the age of six (which, interestingly, is the recommended reading age for the book).

And there is far too much laser gun violence and a lot of overt and subliminal gender bashing – boys are garbage, remember – and both Milo and his mother come close to death one too many times.

Second: The inadvertent morale of this story – and don’t think your young one won’t get it – is that if you’re a kid, especially a kid who fights with his mom or, worse yet, a really good kid who does as he’s told even if he doesn’t like it – your mother might be at the top of the most-wanted-by-aliens kidnap list.

A four-year-old, lest we forget, believes such things.

Unusual as it is for an animated Disney film these days, Mars Needs Moms did not do well at the box office over the weekend, pulling fifth place with less than $7 million in receipts and losing out to the other alien newcomer, the panned but popular Battle: Los Angeles, which raked in an unexpected $36 million.

Whether it’s the off-putting rather creepy motion-capture technology of Mars Needs Mom, a technique which does nothing to soften the story or, more importantly, provide a much-needed humanistic feel, or just the fact that it’s not really hitting the story-telling mark for kids or their parents, the good news is that the animated movies Rango and Gnomeo and Juliet are still on tap at the cineplex, and aren’t nearly as alien.

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